Saturday, 23 May 2015

I
don’t really do research on the history of watching TV any more, but I still
like coming across examples of incongruous meetings of the viewer and the viewed.
I found this in The Unexpected Professor
by John Carey (pp. 231-3), who began writing TV reviews for the Listener in 1969:

‘I
knew nothing about television. We didn’t even have a set. But it was not for me
to reason why, so we hired a set from Radio Rentals … I made dreadful mistakes
at first, because I didn’t recognise even the most famous TV personalities when
they appeared on screen – people like bow-tied Robin Day, then a ubiquitous
pundit. However, no one seemed to notice, possibly because no one read the
column … The other programme I liked [apart from Monty Python] was the late-night snooker. Our set was black and
white – almost no one had colour in those days – so the state of play was hard
to follow. But I was gripped by the dramatic details – the waistcoats, the
silence punctuated by tiny flurries of applause, the nervous sips of water
taken by the player waiting his turn. When Karl [Miller, the Listener’s editor] switched me from
television to book reviewing in 1974 the snooker was what I missed most.
However, we felt there was no point keeping our set, so we phoned Radio Rentals
to tell them. The two men who came round were built like heavyweight boxers,
evidently expecting to have to wrest their property from the bosom of a
distraught family unable to keep up the payments. They seemed disappointed we
gave it up without a struggle.’

Professor
Carey joins my long list of intellectual snooker fans, which also includes George
Mackay Brown, A.S. Byatt, Clive James and Raymond Williams.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘The routine of life
goes on, whatever happens, we do the same things, go through the little
performance of eating, sleeping, washing. No crisis can break through the crust
of habit.’ – Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog